Emma Bates Logged Her Labor on Strava

Runners have long joked that a workout doesn’t count unless it’s on Strava, and Emma Bates has now applied that rule to childbirth. The American marathoner wore a heart rate strap through 20 hours of induced labor, then uploaded the whole thing for her followers.

The activity, titled “Warren Emerson Finley” with a blue heart beside it, starts at 1:53 p.m. on July 7 and runs for 20 hours and 37 minutes. Over that time Bates covered 0.26 miles (about 420 meters), which Strava worked out as a pace of 76:48:54 per mile. Underneath the name she put the date July 8, which also happens to be her own birthday, so she turned 34 the day Warren was born. She isn’t the first to log a birth this way: in 2024, a runner named Marina went viral for uploading her labor as a workout that lasted 5 hours and 37 minutes.

“Strava or it didn’t happen,” Bates wrote when she shared the activity on Instagram on Monday. She said she wore her COROS heart rate monitor and Pace 4 watch even though she didn’t need the data, and she was a little disappointed by the distance. “Ok, I honestly thought after 20 hours of induced labor the mileage would be more impressive, but walking was just not it for me,” she wrote.

The heart rate was what she really wanted to show off. Bates said marathon training was the reason it held so even into the final hours, and she listed 10 skills she says she brought from racing into the delivery room, including pain tolerance, breathing control, holding back early and treating the gaps between contractions like the recovery in an interval session. Most runners will know the one about breaking a long race into pieces. “I don’t think about all 26.2 miles at once. I focus on the mile I’m in. In labor, one contraction at a time,” she wrote.

Bates announced the pregnancy on March 5. She had finished 13th at the Valencia Marathon in December in 2:25:51 without knowing she was pregnant, and took a test the next day. In April she told the Boston Globe that she was due in August, which means Warren came a few weeks earlier than expected.

The pregnancy also cost her a sponsor, by her account. In March, Bates said UCAN had ended their three-year partnership after she told the company she was expecting, which UCAN denied, saying it had made the decision in September 2025, before it knew. Asics, her shoe sponsor, said her contract was unchanged and included pregnancy protections. About two months later she signed with NeverSecond. UCAN went on to sign British marathoner Calli Hauger-Thackery in June while she was pregnant, two months after Hauger-Thackery ran the Boston Marathon at 22 weeks.

Bates has been one of the best American marathoners of the past decade. She was the top American woman at the 2023 Boston Marathon, finishing fifth in 2:22:10, her fastest time, although Boston’s downhill point-to-point course means it isn’t eligible for records. Her best on a record-eligible course is 2:23:18, from her seventh-place finish at the 2022 World Championships in Eugene, and she was second at the 2021 Chicago Marathon.

She hasn’t said when she plans to race again. The last of her 10 points was the one she says gets her through the hardest stretches: “When things get really hard, I remind myself what I’m working toward. Sometimes that’s all I need to keep going.”